Rural Areas in Bulgaria – Investigation on some Factors for Development

Abstract

The focus on the specific territories such as rural areas as systems is imperative in order to achieve each of the strategic goals of development at national and European level. The objective of current paper is a subject to the project “7I/14 Regional policy against depopulation of Bulgarian villages” which aims to bring to light opportunities and fields of interventions to reduce depopulation of Bulgarian villages and to formulate recommendations and measures at national and regional level. Present study limits its tasks to: systematization and classification of the factors for development of the rural areas, investigation the role of institutional actors and pointing out the factors that constraint the successful development and some pathways of resolving the bottlenecks. Since the objective data show significant disparities between developed and underdeveloped rural regions and specificity of development factors, a subjective empirical study (survey) among 144 respondents from two regions – underdeveloped and developed, has been conducted. The object of this paper is the discussion on just two of all 13 questions in the questionnaire: 1) the role of the institutions and organizations for the future development of rural areas and 2) the factors limiting development of rural areas. In formulating specific measures for activating the factors and engines of rural development two types of mechanisms need to be applied: 1) maintenance and expansion of the socio-economic functions of the areas and settlements with vitality and economic capacity; 2) social care for people of the depopulated villages and areas which perspective is to drop out from the administrative map of the country. The results show that the development of rural areas and settlements in Bulgaria can be catalyzed using supporting measures which become agents of transition process through deployment of the institutional regime capacity and practice specific approaches towards the different type of regions, areas and settlements.

Study of part of non-agricultural activities in rural areas of South-Central region of Bulgaria for the period 2010 – 2020

“…On the other hand, the persons employed in Human health and social work serve the other activities in RA of the SCR. The interconnectedness of the persons employed in the above-mentioned activities is important because they stop the depopulation of territories that are specific in terms of nature and socioeconomics [20].…”

The cultivation path of vocational talents in rural revitalization industry based on multidimensional data analysis method in the context of industry-education integration

“…The revitalization of rural talents plays a key role in the process of rural revitalization, and the implementation of rural revitalization requires a "three rural" workforce that understands agriculture and loves rural areas and farmers [9][10]. In terms of cultivating "three rural" talents, higher agricultural colleges and universities have natural advantages in terms of teachers, disciplines and teaching resources and can make efforts to break the bottleneck constraints of talents to help rural revitalization [11][12].…”

Investigation of conceptual networks related to climate change among inhabitants: A case study in Eastern Hungarian settlements with word association method

“…In the EU, 23% of the respondents considered climate change to be the world's most serious problem, while in the case of Hungarian respondents the figure was slightly lower, but can be considered very significant, at 17%. Questionnaire survey is a methodology applied in numerous scientific fields (Radu 2012;Knific and Bojnec 2015;Yarkova and Mutafov 2017;Bednarek-Szczepańska 2019). Questionnaire surveying in relation to climate change among the population is also widespread globally (Greenhill et al 2014;Tranter and Booth 2015;Ziegler 2017;van der Linden 2018;Goldberg et al 2019;Poortinga et al 2019;Ballew et al 2020).…”